This
is the title of an Aeon piece by Oliver Roeder, a senior writer for ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight
site. His basic argument is that since algorithms are created by humans, the
art they generate is human art, too. This could well be a joke, but perhaps isn’t
– which would be symptomatic in itself. My first reaction was to say there is a
fundamental difference between real art and that produced by an algorithm (no
matter how much “creativity” has gone into it). One requires, and evokes, a
powerful emotional response; the other doesn’t. On second thought, artists,
writers, composers, and others started to work on erasing this difference over
a century ago. The cultured elite was initially abhorred, but quickly lost
taste in representational art, rhymed
poetry, traditional narrative, tonal music, and the like – and embraced most
forms of aesthetically neutral (or worse) art, poetry/writing, music,
architecture, etc. This trend has recently been reinforced by the entry of tech
billionaites into the prestigious art market. So perhaps we have reached the
point where there is no meaningful difference between human and algorithmic artistic
output.
